Shivani Radhakrishnan

Feminist theorists have critiqued the twenty-first-century turn towards self-care as neoliberal, arguing that personal wellness masks the welfare state’s destruction. I clarify an ambiguity in the argument against self-care’s purported neoliberalism, distinguishing three strands of critique: that self-care is too individual, that self-care is too commercial, and that self-care involves a shift in who is responsible for the reproduction of subjects, from the state to the individual. It is in the Foucauldian critique of self-care as responsibilizing that arguments against self-care’s purported neoliberalism are sharpest. Yet, care for the self is more ambivalent than these arguments admit. Self-care has remained important to Black feminists, feminist scholars of disability, and decolonial feminists, including many explicitly critical of neoliberalism. Attending to the particular contexts from which calls for self-care emerge demonstrate how self-care is compatible with a critique of neoliberalism and can serve as a critique of neoliberalism itself. Neoliberalism is borne disproportionately by Black women, disabled people, and the Indigenous. Members of these groups have historical reasons to distrust the state’s claim to care. They have also been tasked with caring for others instead of for themselves. Finally, care for the self can articulate a refusal of optimization that neoliberalism demands.

Frankfurt School methodology involves a lasting commitment to immanent critique. What distinguishes immanent critique from other forms of social criticism, scholars in this tradition argue, is that social practices are to be judged according to norms and potentials already contained within their objects. This article considers critical theory's relationship to coloniality by developing a three‐part challenge to the practice of immanent critique, drawing on insights of decolonial philosophers Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Maria Lugones, and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. Immanent critics, I conclude, risk being inattentive to constitutive exclusions, reinscribing asymmetrical burdens on certain critics, and unwittingly replaying a mechanism of domination familiar from colonialism in and through their preferred method of critique. Accordingly, I argue that immanent critics should attend to relations of power that govern the practice of critique itself and offer reasons for being more pluralistic about our methods of criticism.